When Joshua Silverstein, a Black Jewish theater artist, was growing up in Los Angeles, he recalls one Ashkenazi couple, to whom he refers as Bob and Shirley, that had a particularly profound effect on him.

Bob and Shirley were the type of people who greeted everyone they saw on the street; Silverstein grew up going to their get-togethers that were welcome to everyone in the neighborhood. They loved music and literature, they were “way into Theodore Bikel,” and they had a plethora of Billie Holiday records.

Bob and Shirley were also instrumental in the fight to elect Los Angeles’ first Black mayor, Thomas Bradley.

“LA’s Bob and Shirley,” which Silverstein wrote and is performing as part of a new theater compilation of Jewish stories, begins in 1946 when the couple moved to the west coast from New Jersey. Bob was a carpenter — he had wanted to be a professor, but his Jewish background made it challenging to get hired at a university. Instead, he constructed buildings across Los Angeles, only to find out that the same apartments he worked on didn’t allow Jews or other minorities to live there.

The couple ended up near Central Avenue, an epicenter of African-American culture where they rubbed shoulders with legendary Black performers and intellectuals — Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes and W.E.B Dubois. The neighborhood was in danger, though; real estate agents were pressuring residents to leave so their properties could be refurbished and sold to white homeowners.

Together, Bob and Shirley co founded the Alta Loma Democratic Club, where Thomas Bradley began to show up to meetings. At the time, he was a lieutenant in the police department who, as a Black man, experienced bigotry of his own. Bradley had a vision to preserve the neighborhood, and inspired by Bradley’s vision and spirit, Bob and Shirley encouraged Bradley to run for city council.

“At first he said no,” Silverstein said. But Bob told Bradley, “If you do it, we will get you elected.”

If it hadn’t been for the Alta Loma Democratic Club, “Tom Bradley would not have then gone on to be mayor,” Silverstein said.  “LA being this place where we feel like it’s diverse took a lot of work, and this is because of what Tom Bradley did.” His 20-year term was the longest in Los Angeles’ history.

Silverstein’s piece is just one of the many stories told in L’Chaim America, a commemoration of the United States’ 250th anniversary produced by The Braid, a Los Angeles theater company with the mission of telling Jewish stories.

“Our show is really a celebration of the diversity that makes up what America is. It is this beautiful love letter to the hope for the future,” Silverstein told me.

The Braid is a story-telling theater, and L’Chaim America is a minimalist production. Armed only with binders and their words, performers share stories commissioned by writers or solicited from community members: Author Emily Bowen Cohen explores her dual Jewish and Native American identities, Solomon Dueñas, an El Salvadoran immigrant, reconnects with his Jewish roots. Silverstein is the only writer performing his own work.

Silverstein told me his mission was twofold: He hoped to share an untold piece of Los Angeles’ history and, having Black and Jewish identities himself, to shed light on the historic Black-Jewish alliance.

“What people don’t hear often is how there were Ashkenazi Jews who were radical in their support of Blackness and other marginalized voices,” he said.

Until he started researching his piece, Silverstein never fully understood the role Bob and Shirley played in Los Angeles’ history. For him, and for members of the audience who knew and loved people like Bob and Shirley, Silverstein’s piece was a way of appreciating what they managed to achieve.

“The coalition that came together to get him elected to mayor was a coalition of Jewish people,” Silverstein said. “This wasn’t about religion. It wasn’t about culture. It wasn’t about ethnicity. It was about human beings recognizing that this is a city they love and to come together to change it for the good.”

Silverstein believes his work is significant in how “it recognizes the ugly,” but does not shy away from it in order to reveal a more realistic, yet more inspiring, picture of America. This America requires looking “at the areas that have been challenging — at the areas that have been hard and terrible — and not closing our eyes to it, but promising to do better.”

“L’Chaim America” is being performed in theaters in and across Los Angeles through June 17. On June 7, the Skirball Cultural Center will host a special production of the performance as part of a community-wide celebration in partnership with other Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles and the Jews of Color Initiative. Additional performances will be held in Irvine on June 28 and in New York City on July 12.

The post They helped elect Los Angeles’ first Black mayor; but to him, they were just Bob and Shirley appeared first on The Forward.

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor didn’t set out to write a memoir. A professor of history at Smith College with a focus on race, she had published an article on the etymology of the n-word in 2016 and wanted to continue her work in a book. But as she began to explore the word’s history in America, it became clear there would be no way to tackle the issue without writing about her father Richard Pryor.

“Why I make the connection between me and my father isn’t simply because he was famous, but because he put the n-word on the pop culture map,” Pryor told me in an interview, adding that he specifically used “the Black version of the n-word in a subversive way in his comedy — and then a decade later disavowed it.”

Richard Pryor was one of the first Black comedians to use the n-word on stage and he did so boldly, in a way no Black performer really had. He embraced it as a way to assert his identity and as a way to mock white racism. He used it to connect him to his Black audience who could understand the jokes he made about racial trauma in America in a way non-Black audiences couldn’t. The n-word, Pryor writes, was a staple in many of her father’s jokes, was featured in the title of two of his most famous comedy albums, and became his “comedic trademark.” But after he traveled to Kenya in the 1980s, Richard Pryor had a revelation about race and stopped using it.

In her new book Something We Said, Pryor, the daughter of the legendary comedian and actor and his first serious white (and Jewish) girlfriend Maxine, skillfully traces her relationship with her father as she was growing up, her relationship to the n-word as a professor of Black history, and the story of the n-word in America. It starts in the 2010s, when a white student said the n-word in one of Pryor’s classes, then rewinds to the beginning of her relationship with her father, who she met for the first time when she was six years old in 1974. The book toggles between the timelines over the course of its 265 pages. Interspersed are what Pryor labels “Interludes,” which track the history of the n-word from the American slave trade to the modern day.

The history of the n-word is far more complex than most people know — and, Pryor reveals, so was her father. He had both a tender and tough side, he could be closed off and also incredibly giving. Although he often presented himself with an impenetrable confidence and swagger, he could never stand up to his domineering grandmother, who he saw pimp out his mom.

The book challenges people’s knee-jerk reactions to the word and discusses the duality of its significance, how it is a word with a hate-filled past that has also been a signal of solidarity. And its reclamation by Black Americans isn’t a new phenomenon. Pryor traces it all the way back to the era of American slavery, including in a work song about a Black folk hero.

Pryor noted that there’s a tendency to “blame artists like my father and of course, hip hop”  for the popularity of the n-word among African-Americans today, but pointed to its politically subversive nature as the source of its endurance in the Black community.

Pryor said she hopes the book will help people “understand that the n-word isn’t just part of a national trauma, like a relic of our past as a nation” but that “it causes these really intimate wounds and becomes a really personal trauma that’s worth exploring and talking about.”

Writing something that is simultaneously deeply personal and intricately historical is not an easy feat — although Pryor’s time jumps feel effortless.

“Many of the things that happened to me were sort of locked in a little memory bubble,” Pryor said. “And I had only interacted with them as that 11 year old, as that 16 year old, as that 22 year old, and had not interacted with them again, as a mother and a wife and a professor, et cetera, as an adult.”

This digging provoked a lot of personal reflection. In one story in Something We Said, Pryor recounts being the only Black girl at a friend’s bat mitzvah in the 80s. Trying to impress a boy and remembering how her father’s use of the n-word made people laugh, Pryor gave her friends permission to call her the n-word, a decision she quickly regretted.

“I had to do a lot of digging about, like, why did I do that? Like, why did I invite that even though I hated that word?”

This story captures the often inexplicable nature of navigating the complexity of race and belonging in America, something that can be complicated for anyone but especially someone of mixed-race heritage. Pryor also had to contend with being a minority in Jewish spaces.

“My mother had me in temple in like second and third grade as soon as we moved to LA and literally nobody there could figure it out,” Pryor said. “Like it was a math problem that was unfathomable. It was pi. Like they could not figure out how I was Black and Jewish.”

While Pryor includes many jaw-dropping stories from her life and from American history, what may baffle people the most is that until the 2010s, Pryor had never watched one of her father’s films or listened to any of his comedy records all the way through (she had kind of listened to one before was when she was a little girl and she fell asleep to it). She wrote that “not knowing my father as a public figure made me feel closer to him as a private man.”

She never went out of her way to make it known that she was Richard Pryor’s daughter. In 2016, during a talk she gave at Smith on the n-word, Pryor finally went public. I asked her how it felt to now be known as his daughter.

“I think I was surprised by how much I like it,” she told me with a laugh.

“I was always proud of my father,” she said. “I just was tired of people and their forward curiosity.”

“What’s happened, in some ways by coming out as his daughter has been so the opposite of that,” Pryor said. “I’ve heard how deeply he touched so many people in a way that maybe I couldn’t hear it before, or I haven’t heard it before.”

Something We Said has given Pryor even more ways to connect with her father.

“One of the highlights for me about writing this book is the kind of healing that happened from it,” she said, noting that she felt closer to him than she “remembered feeling when he was alive.”

“When he died in 2005, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s it. That’s our story.’ And I just feel like it’s really powerful how the universe works, that that didn’t have to be our story, that our story continues.”

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With U.S. aid to Israel and the wars in Gaza and Lebanon pressing for voters in many Democratic primaries, the race to succeed Rep. Jerrold Nadler in Manhattan stands out for the relative consensus among the leading candidates on Israel.

Nadler, who is retiring after 33 years in the House, represents a heavily Jewish district and served as the leading voice in Congress for liberal Jews, making the choice of his successor a significant one nationally.

During a televised debate on Thursday between top contenders, New York Assemblymembers Alex Bores and Micah Lasher, political scion Jack Schlossberg and attorney Goergie Conway spent more time sparring over super PAC money, artificial intelligence and Donald Trump than on the Middle East conflict.

The three largely shared a broad agreement on support for Israel. None embraced the characterisation of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide. They all touted support for a two-state solution and backed continued U.S. funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

The contrast with other competitive Democratic primaries was striking. In congressional races in New York City and some others nationally, debates have been dominated by contentious exchanges over military aid to Israel, accusations of genocide and the growing influence of anti-AIPAC politics within the party. Earlier this week, Israel consumed a significant portion of the televised debate between Rep. Dan Goldman and former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander in a neighboring congressional district.

In another neighboring district, former Columbia University Gaza War encampment activist Daraliza Avila Chevalier is challenging Rep. Adriano Espaillat with his support for Israel front and center. And in a TV debate this week in the race to replace retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez in Brooklyn, democratic socialist Assemblymember Claire Valdez — who like Lander and Avilla Chevalier has been endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani — called Israel’s actions in Gaza “U.S.-funded genocide.”

The relative consensus in Nadler’s district reflects the politics of the district they hope to represent. Jewish voters make up an estimated 30% of the Democratic primary electorate, which stretches across Manhattan’s Upper East and Upper West sides.. When Nadler ran for reelection in 2022 after redistricting forced him to go head to head with Rep. Carolyn Maloney, he campaigned on the need to preserve Jewish representation from New York City in Congress.

The candidates themselves have close ties to the Jewish community. Lasher, Nadler’s endorsed successor, is Jewish. Schlossberg, a grandson of President John F. Kennedy, was raised Catholic by his mother, Caroline Kennedy, but identifies as Jewish. Bores’ wife, Darya Moldavskaya, is Jewish, and the couple are raising their son Jewish.

Another factor distinguishing the race from other Democratic primaries is the district’s political makeup.

In last year’s Democratic mayoral primary, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an outspoken critic of Israel who rose to power by embracing pro-Palestinian activism, won handily in the Goldman and Espaillat districts, but the 12th District split almost evenly between Mamdani and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The candidates also took different approaches to Mamdani. Lasher and Bores did not endorse Mamdani until after he secured the Democratic nomination, mirroring Nadler’s own cautious approach. By contrast, Schlossberg endorsed Mamdani in the primary and has generally been the most critical in the field of Israeli government policies.

Mamdani, who resides in Gracie Mansion in the district, has said he won’t endorse in the race, but intends to cast a ballot. In Thursday’s debate, the candidates gave Mamdani A- and B grades.

Polling suggests the race remains highly competitive. A recent Emerson College survey showed Lasher with a slim advantage over Bores, while Schlossberg and Conway trailed behind. But most significantly, 32% of likely voters had yet to make up their minds.

In an online poll of 700 debate viewers by host PIX11, 42% said Bores won the debate, compared with 33% for Lasher and 24% for Schlossberg.

The leading candidates

Micah Lasher, 44, enters the race with perhaps the deepest roots in New York politics. A longtime Democratic operative and protégé of Nadler, Lasher has assembled support from many of the district’s traditional political leaders.

Lasher started his public career as a special assistant to Nadler in 2007. He previously worked for former New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. Kathy Hochul. At 17, he was an informal adviser to then-Assemblymember Scott Stringer, who is also Jewish. He is serving his first term in the State Assembly.

Growing up in the Upper West Side, Lasher first gained attention as a magician.

His campaign reflects continuity with the brand of liberal Zionism long represented by Nadler, co-chair of the Congressional Jewish Caucus: support for Israel’s security, opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and a commitment to a two-state solution.

Alex Bores, 35, has emerged as the progressive coalition-builder trying to bridge fierce Israel critics and mainstream Jewish voters. He attracted support from organizations aligned with the Democratic Party’s left flank, such as the Bernie Sanders-aligned Our Revolution, New York Progressive Action Network and PSC-CUNY, despite describing himself as a Zionist supporter of Israel.

Bores, a former Palantir data scientist, also serves in the state Assembly. His congressional campaign has become a focal point of a major political proxy war over the regulation of AI.

Some Jewish leaders have expressed concern over how Bores would align with the groups who backed him in Congress, as tensions between progressive activists and Zionist organizations continue to grow. Bores also faced scrutiny over social media posts of his father, William, some equating between Nazis and Zionists. Bores told Jewish Insider he disagrees with his father’s views.

Jack Schlossberg, 33, has become the race’s most recognizable figure because of his family name and social media presence. He has touted the younger generation’s voice wrestling publicly with questions of Jewish identity and Israel.

Raised Catholic but identifying as Jewish through his father, Schlossberg frequently references his Jewish heritage when discussing Israel and antisemitism. At the same time, he has adopted positions that place him to the left of many Jewish organizations, particularly his support for halting transfers of offensive weapons to Israel.

Schlossberg repeatedly shares that contrast on X as he challenges his rivals on Israel policy.

The online influencer turned political candidate made Jewish security a central pillar of his campaign. He said that if elected, he would immediately introduce legislation to nearly double federal funding for security upgrades at synagogues and other Jewish institutions.

Their views on U.S. military assistance for Israel

At Thursday’s debate, as previously, the leading candidates voiced support for funding Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system amid growing calls for ending all U.S. aid to Israel.

Arms sales and aid for offensive weapons represented the clearest divide among the candidates.

Lasher said he’d support certain conditions on military aid in accordance with the Leahy laws, which enable the State Department to prohibit military aid to foreign countries when there is credible evidence that they have committed gross human rights violations.

Bores said he’d “strengthen those laws significantly” so they apply equally to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Schlossberg, however, said he would support Democratic efforts to block transfers of 1,000-pound bombs and oppose the sale of bulldozers that could be used for demolitions in Gaza or the occupied West Bank. He went on to accuse his rivals of lacking the “courage” to challenge the status quo.

“The Leahy laws give Donald Trump and Marco Rubio full discretion over what constitutes a humanitarian crime,” Schlossberg said. “I’m not comfortable passing the buck to them, and I think the candidates on this stage should be strong enough and have enough courage to actually answer the question.”

The war in Gaza

All three candidates voiced criticism of Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza, citing the dire humanitarian situation and the civilian death toll. However, when asked whether Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide, they declined to use the term.

Lasher maintained that the debate over definitions often “does more to divide people of good faith than it does to find common ground. He called the killing of tens of thousands of people in Gaza “horrific,” while emphasizing the need to recognize the loss of civilian life.

Bores similarly said he’s “not comfortable” using that word “because of the high intent threshold that is required as part of it.” He said that while there are ongoing international investigations, the United States should focus on ending atrocities and expanding humanitarian aid.

Schlossberg also stopped short of calling the war genocide, though he delivered the sharpest criticism of Israel’s military conduct. “Israel had every right to defend itself following Oct. 7, but what has happened since then has gone above and beyond,” Schlossberg said. He added that the more important question was what policymakers would do next, pointing to his position on halting offensive weapon transfers.

Conway, a former Never-Trump Republican who is running on a platform to impeach President Donald Trump, said that while Israel ​”did too much” in the name of self-defense, I don’t think it meets the threshold of genocide … and I don’t believe that we should abandon Israel as an ally.”

The debate followed a candidate forum Wednesday at which the candidates spoke at greater length about their attachment to Israel, support for a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, and their opposition to Netanyahu.

The post In the race for Jerry Nadler’s seat, much talk on Israel but little disagreement appeared first on The Forward.